Fast and efficient MATLAB-based MPM solver (fMPMM-solver v1.1) Emmanuel Wyser1, Yury Alkhimenkov1,2,3, Michel Jaboyedoff1,2, and Yury Y. Podladchikov1,2,3 1Institute of Earth Sciences, University of Lausanne, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland 2Swiss Geocomputing Centre, University of Lausanne, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland 3Department of Mechanics and Mathematics, Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia Correspondence: Emmanuel Wyser (
[email protected]) Abstract. We present an efficient MATLAB-based implementation of the material point method (MPM) and its most recent variants. MPM has gained popularity over the last decade, especially for problems in solid mechanics in which large defor- mations are involved, i.e., cantilever beam problems, granular collapses, and even large-scale snow avalanches. Although its numerical accuracy is lower than that of the widely accepted finite element method (FEM), MPM has been proven useful 5 in overcoming some of the limitations of FEM, such as excessive mesh distortions. We demonstrate that MATLAB is an ef- ficient high-level language for MPM implementations that solve elasto-dynamic and elasto-plastic problems. We accelerate the MATLAB-based implementation of MPM method by using the numerical techniques recently developed for FEM opti- mization in MATLAB. These techniques include vectorisation, the usage of native MATLAB functions, the maintenance of optimal RAM-to-cache communication, and others. We validate our in-house code with classical MPM benchmarks including 10 i) the elastic collapse under self-weight of a column, ii) the elastic cantilever beam problem, and iii) existing experimental and numerical results, i.e., granular collapses and slumping mechanics respectively. We report a performance gain by a factor of 28 for a vectorised code compared to a classical iterative version.